Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Caroline McCarthy, who is an advertising executive and a columnist for Spectator USA, and we're going to be discussing the Andrew Yang phenomenon. Now, Caroline, Andrew Yang is a very unusual presidential candidate. That he is. On the Democratic side, can you give us a little introduction to who he is, what his presidential

campaign is all about, and what's going on with it? Sure. So people in the tech industry,

myself included, first became familiar with Andrew Yang largely because he founded a non-profit

after selling his company, and that nonprofit is called Venture for America,

which takes the sort of the Teach for America model and applies it to the startup world by placing

highly qualified and extremely ambitious college graduates into roles in startups in cities in

America that could use revitalization.

It's a very well-respected nonprofit in the tech world and has a lot of prominent people on its board and among its supporters.

So that's sort of where the industry found out about him in the first place.

And then his run for president was, he announced it after he

had written a book that I believe is called The War on Normal People and is about the rise of

automation and his belief that the way to prevent the job losses that he sees coming thanks to that

wave of automation is by what he calls

a freedom dividend, which is a $1,000 check written by the government every month to every American

adult, which is the more common term for that is universal basic income. And that has been

universal basic income or UBI has been bubbling on the internet

as being, you know, sort of a not, I would say it's past a fringe political idea by this point,

but certainly not a mainstream idea. But he really made it the centerpiece of his campaign.

And then he also, you know, one of the complaints I've

heard about a lot of the Democratic candidates for the presidency next year is that they've got,

you know, big personalities, big followings, and nobody really knows what exactly they support

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